


In A Minute There Is Time

by RedheadAmongWolves



Category: Mindhunter (TV 2017)
Genre: Angst, Guilt, M/M, Mental Instability, Post-Season/Series 01, References to Past Domestic Abuse, not explicitly relationship-y but it's so there
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-28
Updated: 2019-07-28
Packaged: 2020-07-23 10:34:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20006905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RedheadAmongWolves/pseuds/RedheadAmongWolves
Summary: He studies Holden, like so many photographs spread across a bulletin board, and he can see the strings they would’ve spun to connect the dots, the tragic backstory, the spiral from sanity, leading them here, to this prison, to this room, to this table.





	In A Minute There Is Time

**Author's Note:**

> title comes from T.S. Eliot's Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and the lines, "In a minute there is time / For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse" OOF i'm suffering

See, the worst thing is, Bill saw it coming. Before he even knew he was seeing it. But at that bar, in that haze of smoke, watching Holden-- fucking Boy Scout Holden Ford-- downing another shot, all but lounging on a barstool, lips loose as underwear flapping on a clothes line, it was like a picture came into focus.

At first Bill was pissed at Holden. Letting it come to this, pushing them so far past the edge of what was okay that Bill doesn’t even know where they first took a wrong turn. But after everything happened, after the OPR, the interviews, the phone call from Wendy in the middle of the night, Bill signs the check-in book at the federal prison and mostly feels pissed at himself.

He’s a forensic analyst, after all, putting pieces of a puzzle together is what he does for a paycheck. And yet he missed the puzzle right under his nose, and it stayed there in disarray, until the pieces started dropping off the table altogether, lost to the shadows.

It’s been a few months. Bill hadn’t had the courage to come until now. He’s still not sure, as the guard leads him down the concrete hallway, which looks like every hallway he’d walked down with Holden at his side, clutching that dumb tape recorder, that he has the courage now. Because the place at his side is empty, and that tape recorder is in his own sweaty grip, and at the end of that hallway isn’t Ed Kemper or Jerry Brudos or Richard fucking Speck. Not this time.

He sits at the table, metal cold on his ass through the fabric of his pants, and waits. The barred door swings open with a jarring clang, and Holden Ford is led through, clad in an ill-fitting orange jumpsuit, chains dangling between his feet, his wrists. Bill watches the guard cuff the chains to the tabletop, give them a tug before bowing out of the room. The tension in the air is thick as smoke. Sweat pricks at Bill’s neck. He resists the urge to tug at his collar.

He hits record. When he looks up, Holden’s watching the tape spin around in its compartment.

Bill looks back down at the questionnaire, unseeing.

“Mr. Ford,” Bill says, his voice too loud. It bounces off the walls. “The FBI is conducting interviews with people who’ve been convicted of or suspected of committing violent crimes. What you discuss with me cannot be used against you--”

A low chuckle interrupts him, startling him and making him stumble over his words, and he tries to keep talking but the laugh just builds and builds, until Bill’s voice leaves him, and all he can do is give in and look up at Holden.

The kid’s leaning back in his chair, head tipped back in mirth, and he just grins at Bill when he catches his eye, that same grin he’d always give when they’d reeled in another slippery fish, caught a rat with its tail in their trap. Only now the light doesn’t reach his eyes.

“I think we can skip the speech, Bill,” Holden drawls. As he is now, smug and haggard and exposed under the sickly white fluorescents, Bill marvels how he hadn’t seen it before.

“I’m under strict instructions to follow protocol,” Bill manages. This makes Holden’s grin widen.

“From who, Wendy or Shepard?”

Bill doesn’t answer. Holden nods as if he had. “So, Wendy. Shepard probably doesn’t care what you do to my ass, but Wendy,” he leans in close to the tape recorder, so his voice will be loud and clear, and Bill dreads listening back to the tape, “wants untainted data.” He sprawls back in his chair, a drastic difference from the ramrod posture of old. “I’m afraid I won’t play to the rules that easily, even on this side of the table.”

 _At least he isn’t denying reality,_ Wendy’s voice says in Bill’s head.

“After all,” Holden says. “Not every day you get to watch an FBI agent snap in real time.”

Like he said, Bill had seen it coming. It’d been the little things. Holden stopped wearing his ties, starting untucking his shirts. Rolling up his sleeves. That perfectly combed back hair was rumpled, like he’d just rolled out of bed, hadn’t gotten a haircut in a while. At a glance, it’d just been arrogance, self-confidence where there hadn’t been any before. The Holden in front of him now looks the same on the outside, but look a little closer, and it’s like a cheap costume. A mask. It makes Bill’s stomach churn.

Bill’s spent the last few weeks drifting through the halls of Quantico like a ghost, and his nights at the library, poring over medical journals that made his eyes swim. One night he’d looked up to the clock to find it was already quarter past ten, and at the table across from him he’d seen a crystal clear image of Holden, probably a few years younger than he knew him now, a pile of books at his elbow and pencil in hand, doing the exact same research. Trying to find an explanation. A reason. Bill scrubbed a hand down his face and the boy had disappeared.

Bill had found his explanation. And he’s furious, because it’s all his fault.

Bill lowers his hands to his lap to hide their shaking, but too late he knows the movement has caught Holden’s eye, and that he knows exactly what it means.

“Do I scare you?” Holden asks, wonder in his voice.

It’s Bill’s fault, so he owes it to Holden to tell him the truth.

He shoves the questionnaire aside-- he’ll deal with Wendy’s wrath later-- and Holden raises his eyebrows at him as Bill sets his elbows on the table and cants his body closer. Holden mimics the pose like a parrot.

“Have you ever heard of post-concussion syndrome?” Bill asks.

Holden barks a laugh. “I’m sorry, do you have a medical diagnosis for me, _doctor?_ ”

Bill just looks at him. “PCS and frontal lobe damage are a medical mystery. It’s been known to have effects that don’t appear for weeks, even months after a head trauma. Signs can be small things like irritability, headaches, dizziness, nausea. But it can have extreme side effects too. Forgetfulness. Even personality changes. Narcissism disorders-- guy in Vermont, 1850s? Got a railroad spike rammed through his nasal cavity, right through his brain. Outwardly he was completely fine, but after a few weeks people started noticing he was acting different. He drank all the time, had a temper that he hadn’t had before.”

“I didn’t know you were such a history buff, Bill,” Holden remarks tonelessly, but his eyes have darkened, a faraway edge to them.

“Nobody could explain it until they analyzed his brain after he was dead, saw the real damage. They still don’t really understand it, but--”

“Do you know why I started all this, Bill?” Holden asks suddenly, cutting him off. Bill leans back.

“Summer in college, the Speck murders caught your eye,” Bill provides, because that’s all Holden has given him, when it comes down to brass tacks. He’s spent the last half a year with him, sharing a blur of nameless hotels and diners in faceless cities, and yet this man sitting in front of him is, essentially, a stranger. Bill was never one to get all twisted up trying to become friends with his coworkers. Maybe he should’ve made more of an effort.

Holden casts a stray glance to the recorder again, before flicking his eyes away to somewhere over Bill’s shoulder. He shakes his head. “My dad used to hit my mom.”

“It was the Depression. So did everyone else’s dad,” Bill says on instinct, quippy reply slipping out before he can bite it back, remind himself this isn’t like their old rapport.

The corner of Holden’s mouth quirks up humorlessly. “Yeah, maybe. But my mom came into my room one night, when I was eight. Middle of the night, woke me up. I could barely see her in the dark, but I could feel her face when I reached out, and the whole side of it was swollen. Like a balloon.” Holden’s fingers drift up, like he’s reaching for the memory, and it jangles the chains. He blinks. His fingers lower to splay across the orange of his thighs. “She was crying. She crawled into bed with me, and she held me, and she told me, ‘Don’t ever be like your father, Holden. Don’t ever become your father.’”

“I get to high school, and Psychology 101 tells me about nature v. nurture, and I get to thinking: is it biological? Are we… predestined to be who we are, because of genes and DNA and dominant traits? Or is it a choice? Can we choose who we become?”

Bill watches Holden. Studies him, like so many photographs spread across a bulletin board, and he can see the strings they would’ve spun to connect the dots, the tragic backstory, the spiral from sanity, leading them here, to this prison, to this room, to this table. His chest tightens.

“The Speck case rolls around, and my old man dies of prostate cancer, and my mom remarries not a month later, like the new guy had just been waiting on the sidelines. They live out in Delaware. Got a little townhouse, a cat. I haven’t visited them in years,” Holden continues. “I change majors when school starts up again in the fall. Fast track to Quantico. Sometimes I think I’m just trying to outrun the ghost of my dad.”

Somewhere in the distance a cell door clatters shut, and the spell breaks. Holden jolts out of his memories and plasters on a grin. “Look at that. You got me talking without a single question. The student surpasses the master.”

“You fucking wish you were the master,” Bill mutters, and Holden laughs a bitter laugh.

“Yeah, maybe.”

He looks impossibly young and impossibly old all at once. He looks terrible in orange. He needs to be back in his perfectly pressed suit, back at the BSU, in their dumb basement and surrounded by their billion filing cabinets, and Bill knows they have a solid case, he just needs to convince the drama queen in front of him.

Bill sucks in a breath. “You got sideswiped by a car going sixty miles an hour, Holden. Frankly I’m still shocked I didn’t see your head spin around on your spine.”

“I don’t think you can just wave this one away, Bill,” Holden whispers.

Fuck it, Bill thinks, and he turns off the recorder with a jab of his finger. Holden stares.

“What about protocol?”

“Fuck protocol. You’re my partner, Holden, and it’s my goddamn fault that car hit us, and it never should have happened, I should’ve--”

“Seen it coming? So it is predestined, then,” Holden gets that distant look in his eye again, and Bill slams his fist on the table.

“No, you dipshit, it’s distracted driving. We get a doctor in here, they’ll tell you the exact same thing, and in a few months we’ll have you back at your desk, back with me in a crappy diner drinking crappy coffee, and it’ll all go back to normal.” He knows he sounds desperate, but he can’t keep the plea out of his voice, not when it’s kept him up every single night since this all went to hell.

Holden shakes his head, and calls for the guard. The door swings open, and Holden gives Bill a small smile.

“Thank you, Bill. You’ve been a good friend.” The weight of his gaze is heavy, and Bill’s chest tightens, and he wants to reach out, grab Holden’s hand, pull him out of there, pull him out of himself. “I wish you all the luck in the world.”

The guard leads Holden out, and Bill watches after him. This isn’t the end. If he has to drag Holden out of here kicking and screaming, then that’s what he’s going to do. He’s the goddamn FBI. They don’t give up without a fight.

He gathers up the tape recorder and his briefcase and retraces his steps to the exit. He steps back out into blinding sunlight, casting one look back over his shoulder as he goes.

**Author's Note:**

> everyone is mean to holden ford and he does not!!!!! deserve it!!!!! hannibal & love of my life will graham ruined my perception of serial killers lmao gimme all the dark!fics i need them while i count the days till hannibal season four
> 
> my knowledge of PCS comes from Elementary I am not a medical expert in any way whatsoever lol. Dude in Vermont is the very real Phineas Gage but my knowledge of him comes from Drunk History
> 
> Roughly a year passed between my watching the first three episodes and watching the final seven, so I have no idea if Holden was ever given a backstory, so I made one up instead of just rewatching it forgive me
> 
> It’s also very ambiguous why Holden is in prison because i couldn’t settle on a reason lmao I wrote this in an hour don't @ me
> 
> i don't own/profit/disclaimers disclaimers/etc etc etc
> 
> it would mean the world to me if you left a comment/kudos!!!!!!!! ily!!!!!


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